Trevor Paglen: You've Just Been F$%^#d by PSYOPs — UFOs, Magic, Electronic Warfare, Mind Control, Artificial Intelligence, and the Death of the Internet

Abstract

As AI-generated content, social media influence operations, microtargeted advertising, and ubiquitous surveillance have become the norm on the internet and in the market in general, we have entered an era of PSYOP capitalism. This is an era of generated hallucinations and manipulations designed to transform each of us into a "targeted individual" through the manipulation of perception. In this talk, artist, filmmaker, and technologist Trevor Paglen explores a history of secret military and intelligence programs that serve as antecedents to a phantasmagoric present.

Biography

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.

Paglen's work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. 

Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.

Paglen is the author of several books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Art Forum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award; in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017. 

Paglen holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley.

This lecture is coorganized by the Society for the Humanities Humanities Scholar Program, with additional cosponsorship by the Media Studies Program, Milstein Program, and University Lectureship Program.